Buildings use and consume a variety of resources such as electricity, water, gas, and steam. These resources are more commonly referred to as utilities. Many facilities control utility consumption through a system of controllers. For example, thermostats placed around a building can regulate the temperature of regions within the building.
Utilities are often metered at the point where they enter buildings and readings of the meters indicate how much of the utility has been consumed. In many systems, a person reads the meter at two different times and then determines the buildings consumption during the period encompassed by those two times. More recently, remote metering capabilities have removed the person from the process. Meters can be connected to a communications network such that computers can remotely query the meters.
Those practiced in the art of linear regression and local regression are familiar with modeling techniques such as LOESS. A data set can contain numerous samples of the values of independent variables and of dependent variables that depend on those independent variables. Techniques such as LOESS can produce a model of the data set. When given values for the independent variables, the model can produce an estimates of the dependent variables and their variances. The variance estimates are an indication of how “noisy” the dependent variable estimates are.
In an effort to conserve resources, historical data can be examined in an effort to determine trends in utility consumption. Systems and methods for analyzing resource utilization are needed.